UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina

translated and edited by historian Ryan Holmberg as part of Smudge, “a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga”.

Honestly, this was rad and creepy all at once. The original manga was published in 1976, and has been translated and repackaged here for English-speaking audiences, with illuminating essays and notes to boot. Shirakawa Marina loved both space stories and Japanese folklore, and combines them with aplomb in this tale of alien horror.

Aoki is on a hiking trip with his classmates when he hurts his leg, necessitating that he and one of his teachers, Sada, stay overnight in a remote mountain cabin while the rest of his class returns to Shizuoka. That evening, a great crash rouses Aoki, Sada and their elderly host. The adults are shocked to find that a UFO has crashed nearby. After telling their host to go get help, Sada puts Aoki on his back and goes to take a closer look at the crash site. Despite Aoki’s pleas, Sada doesn’t want to get too close, just in case the UFO actually does pose a threat.

Nearly twelve hours later, government officials come to secure the crash site. Sada and Aoki are whisked away to a facility where they discover, to their dismay, that the truth is being covered up. Aoki’s visiting mother and sister laugh at his story of a UFO, repeating the official line that it was just a meteorite. But when the news starts reporting that other “meteorites” have been falling all over Japan and the rest of the world, Aoki and Sada both suspect that that UFO was just the herald of a far greater menace to humanity than they’d ever imagined.

The main plot is interspersed with Japanese folktales of weird and/or monstrous mushrooms that only serve to underscore how very strange fungi are, and how unsettling people have almost always found them. The story overall is neatly done, feeling very cinematic even as the artistic style hews closely to old school manga, with almost cutesy main characters contrasting sharply with the monstrosities that take over towards the end. The focus on environmental justice makes this feel like the spiritual predecessor to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, with more than a frisson of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance Of Earth’s Past. Don’t worry tho, this book is entirely self-contained within its 200 or so pages.

Being a horror manga, UFO Mushroom Invasion definitely isn’t for the faint of heart. Tho there’s nothing in it that would make this book earn anything more restrictive than a PG-13 rating, it can be rather graphically unsettling, but no worse than any realistic depiction of, say, actual zombie fungi. It’s definitely an interesting view of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina was published September 17 2024 by Living The Line and is available from all good booksellers, including